University of Sheffield 3 June 2016

Registration for Academia & Affect is now open at the link below! This is a free event.

Please remember, this event is directed specifically at postgraduate students and early career researchers. If you are lucky enough to be employed on a full-time contract, we would consider you to be academic staff and would prefer that you do not attend.

Please note, Academia & Affect is completely free to attend and a vegetarian & vegan lunch will be provided, along with water. We regret to say that we will not be able to offer bursaries for those struggling with the cost of travel, as we are working on a very limited budget. Registration will open nearer to the time of the event.

CALL FOR PAPERSAcademia & Affect: Thinking Through Personal Relationships to ResearchA Critical & Interdisciplinary Symposium at the University of Sheffield3rd June 2016 Humanities Research Institute 10:00-17:30

This one day interdisciplinary symposium follows on from the same event last year and will again offer a safe and inclusive space for postgraduate students to discuss the various complex issues raised when thinking through affective relationships to research. The academic environment can often function to discourage affective investments, or position such responses as inappropriate. This symposium will invite critical and reflective thinking on the role of affect in the research environment and will focus on the question:

How can/should affect be accommodated in a research environment?

We are particularly interested in experiences researchers might have as they move through the institution, and how these might relate to affect. For example:

Managing wellbeing as a PhD researcher: Doing research that is triggering, researching the ‘self’ or own community, labour beyond research (studying with a second job, studying as a carer/parent/sex worker), individual/institutional responsibility, supervisor expectations and relationships, communication and disclosure, future job prospects, critical perspectives on self-care, critical perspectives on “diversity”

Interdisciplinarity: Instrumentalisation of research in interdisciplinary projects, distribution of resources, questions of ‘legitimacy’, ‘value’ and ‘impact’

Public engagement: Who are the “public”?, hierarchies and elitism, labour and volunteering, CV development

HE & the market: Responses to the HE Green Paper and the Teaching Excellence Framework

We invite proposals from the Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences for reflective talks from 5 – 15 minutes in length that broadly speak to any of these themes. We particularly encourage talks which reflect on and analyse personal experience, and these may be in any format. We welcome contributions in pairs or groups, talks that use video or audio material, or proposals that diverge in any way from conventional presentation styles. During the day there will be an emphasis on collaborative discussion and group reflection and, as such, expressions of interest to attend without presenting are also welcome. This event will be for postgraduate and early career researchers* only, in order to better facilitate comfortable and open conversation among peers. Some themes suggested for consideration in the above context are listed below, but proposals for contributions should by no means be limited to these:
Supervisory relationships
· Race & Ethnicity
· Dis/ability
· Sex Work
· Grief & Trauma
· Mental Health
· Feminism & Gender Identity
· Speaking Out/Calling Out Others
· Animals/Animal Rights
· Relationships With Academic Peers
· Activism (safe spaces/free speech)
· Academic Refugees
· Writing Anxiety
· Teaching Difficult Texts
Contact: academia.affect@sheffield.ac.uk by 1st May 2016https://academiaaffect.wordpress.com@academiaaffect

*Please note, if you are an early career researcher lucky enough to be employed on a permanent contract, we would consider you to be academic staff and therefore would prefer you not to attend this event.

Our CFP is now (briefly!) extended until Wednesday 6th May and is open to abstracts from all universities. Email academia.affect@sheffield.ac.uk. Thank you to everyone who has already submitted you will hear from us very soon 🙂